Accessibility of Target.com
February 11th, 2006
Yesterday during my search of the web I ran across an article, that Justin posted about the lawsuit brought about from the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) against Target.com. The lawsuit has to do with target.com’s accessibility standards of their site. Derek Featherstone has posted a good description of the lawsuit on his site called Box of Chocolates. However, there may be one section of the Derek’s post that I would disagree with. In Derek’s excellent post he stated the following,
Target.com is powered by Amazon.com, so who is responsible? are both responsible? a 50-50 split? 75-25? does the Amazon.com engine that is powering the site even allow Target developers make it accessible? Depending on the functionality of the Amazon engine, can it be considered an Authoring Tool and thus subject to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines? Did Amazon promise accessibility but not deliver? Did accessibility even make it on to the radar when building the site?
I would have to disagree with this for the following reason. Amazon.com looks like it uses Target for strictly punchout uses only. What that means is that when you load Amazon and select the Target store it loads up the target.com’s catalog. Then when you go to buy something your actually purchasing that item through Amazon but using Target’s site. It gets added to your Amazon shopping cart and you pay Amazon for the items you want to purchase. Amazon then has some workings behind the seen to get the items to you. So I wouldn’t think that Amazon would get involved in this lawsuit because all Amazon does it loads Target’s site.
On the hand, I think this lawsuit is good and bad for web developers and companies. First the good part is that more and more companies will be needing to conform to web accessibility standards and there will be a push to hire more developers to do this if the NFB wins this lawsuit. On the down side, it’s going to cost companies more money to hire these people and could have a negative effect on the current or future development of site on the net. The good thing about all this is that web accessibility will become a norm (hopefully). I know that most sites, including the ones I have developed, conform minimally or not at all to the accessibility standards. We will see what happens in the near future. Personally I think this is a huge lawsuit for all web developers no matter what kind of sites you develop. Stay tuned!
Good links about the lawsuit